STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — After that long winter well behind us, I savor these wonderful sun-soaked days, high humidity and all. But as the sycamore trees shed their crunchy bark and each evening gets just a little shorter, the reality is that the summer is starting to slip away.

So, this is a cue to indulge in the season's bounty particularly with tomatoes, which are fairly inexpensive. And, if you score heirloom varieties — green Zebras, Brandywines, White Wonders, Cheroke Purples and so on — well, then you can have yourself a really stunning salad.

Heirloom tomatoes, as the name suggests, hail from "old" seeds, those that have been stashed away by growers and home gardeners for generations.

Those little treasures yield open-pollinated fruit, creating a pure pedigree for the tomato as opposed to a specimen that hails from a line of hybrid parents. Heirlooms can be streaked various colors and twisted into perverse shapes. The more ugly the tomato the more heightened can be its taste and zip.

As the W. Atlee Burpee & Co. explains on its website, commercial growers bred hybrid tomatoes so they would be round and unblemished, perfect for the home cook.

"From the 1950s to the 1970s, hybrids dominated the commercial vegetable market, and the older varieties became hard to find," says Burpee.com. But, the site notes, "A growing interest in cooking and food sparked a resurgence of the more flavorful heirlooms."

So, enjoy the natural beauty of tomatoes you might find at a farmers market, the backyard or a specialty food store like Trader Joe's in Travis or LaBella Marketplace in Tottenville. Play with an heirloom's colors and bring out its natural vim and vigor: Just dress the naked fruit with a bright and healthy vinaigrette.